In a governmentwide study of the gender pay gap in government, OPM found that some agencies were requiring the use or consideration of a job candidate’s existing salary when setting pay for new General Schedule employees.

“Reliance on existing salary to set pay could potentially adversely affect a candidate who is returning to the workplace after having taken extended time off from his or her career or for whom an existing rate of pay is not reflective of the candidate’s current qualifications or existing labor market conditions,” Cobert states.

“FEW definitely supports any initiatives to help close the gender pay gap in the federal government (which I believe it about 7-11 cents). In reading the OPM memorandum, we see good approaches that OPM is recommending to agencies in developing analysis, but we were a little disappointed that these are only ‘recommendations’ and not ‘requirements.’ We also would request that this analysis be made available to the public in a true transparency effort. Agencies will not improve their respective gaps if no one is aware of which agencies actually have the biggest gaps,” Kopenhaver told FEDmanager.